Aid would be easier to deliver if air access were restored, WFP stressed that as two airports in the M23 areas “have been effectively closed since the end of January… we are urgently calling for the establishment of a humanitarian air corridor,” said Cynthia Jones, WFP’s country director for the DRC.
The alarm follows the release of a report by UN-backed experts on food insecurity Integrated Food Security Stage Classification (IPC) Platformwarning that nearly 25 million people experience high levels of food insecurity, referred to as IPC3 on a scale of one to five, with five indicating famine.
This includes an alarming three million people facing an “emergency” of hunger – IPC4 – a number that is “continuing to rise” and is “almost double since last year”, Ms Jones said.
“What does this mean for families? It means they skip their meals, depleting all their household assets. They sell their animals”, she told journalists in Geneva via video from Kinshasa.
According to the UN agency, “people are already dying of hunger” in parts of eastern DR Congo.
Ms. Jones noted that fighting between M23 militiamen and DRC government forces continues, leading to new displacement and people being “forced from their homes again and again.”
In the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, This leaves approximately 5.2 million displaced people “including 1.6 million who have been displaced this year alonemaking the DRC one of the largest displacement crises in the world,” the WFP official added.
Despite rising hunger, funding for life-saving humanitarian work is running out and the UN agency has been forced to reduce the number of people it helps, from around a million at the start of this year to 600,000 now.
“We will only be able to support a fraction of the people in need” We are moving forward, said Ms. Jones, in an appeal for $350 million to support emergency food and nutrition responses over the next six months. “Without that policy we will have to make further cuts [assistance] further still, to 300,000 – which is only 10 percent of the three million in need.”
Without a significant increase in funding, the WFP warned of a “total breach of the aid pipeline” in March 2026.
“That means a complete halt to all emergency food aid in the eastern provinces.”
The serious funding gap also has internal consequences for the agency. “We are starting to close offices downtown, we are reducing our footprint and headcount and juggling maintaining the operational capacity to deliver results in a highly complex environment,” Ms Jones explains.
And yet aid remains crucial for those displaced in the eastern provinces, including North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika, as vital services have been closed due to persistent insecurity.
“The banks are closed, there is no money available and this has just had a major impact on the population and on the humanitarian response,” Ms Jones explained. “It has devastated livelihoods and left the food security of the affected people in truly dire conditions.”
As the conflict continues, families are seeking shelter in urban centers like Ituri, where host communities are already struggling to cope. Equally worrying is the fact that millions of subsistence farmers who have been displaced from their homes or too afraid to access their land have missed the planting season this year.
“The women, the children, the men, they have just suffered devastating consequences of the violence perpetrated by non-state armed groups and fleeing conflict. They are tired, exhausted and need peace,” Ms. Jones stressed.
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